SurveyMonkey Launches SDK for Mobile Apps

Developing mobile applications is often an exercise in blind futility. Not much of a chance to solicit feedback before launching the application is available. As a result, mobile application developers find that it's not uncommon to discover that users are rating their applications fairly low in any number of application stores. The problem is that beyond some vague comments, usually there's not much to work with in terms of useful feedback that would enable the developer to improve the application.

SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg says that by invoking the APIs that his company is making available, developers of mobile computing applications will be able to survey users about specific issues affecting their applications. Rather than relying on opaque rating systems, SurveyMonkey's approach will allow developers to create a continuous feedback loop inside their applications, says Goldberg.

Mobile developers, of course, have been making use of analytics to improve the functionality of their applications. But to apply analytics, they need a relatively simple way of collecting reliable feedback data. To provide that functionality, SurveyMonkey today also announced that it is partnering with Flurry Analytics to include an analytics engine inside the SurveyMonkey SDK.

In addition to providing that feedback mechanism, SurveyMonkey also envisions developers taking advantage of the SDK to create everything from polling to customer survey applications. The release of the APIs, which will be made available later this year on both Apple iOS and Google Android platforms, will essentially turn SurveyMonkey into a platform, says Goldberg.

The release of the SDK coincides with the release today of SurveyMonkey Mobile, an application for iOS devices that allows end users to create surveys and analyze results on mobile computing devices from Apple. According to Goldberg, SurveyMonkey has seen mobile traffic on its Web site increase by a factor of 14 during the last three years, which is a clear sign that more end users are starting to use mobile computing systems as their primary devices for accessing content on the Web.

SurveyMonkey already claims to process about 2 million surveys per day. With the help of developers invoking its API, SurveyMonkey is clearly about to increase the number of surveys that it processes each day by several orders of magnitude.